Page 59 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER ONE

L EO RELAXED BACK , half-closed his eyes and for a few brief minutes enjoyed the quiet purr of his chauffeur-driven car as it silently cruised away from Manhattan towards his mansion in the Hamptons.

The drive would take well over an hour and a half. In his world, where time was money, this was a luxury when he could have taken the helicopter. It would have covered the distance in less than half the time.

But, for once, he’d needed to relax.

He opened his eyes and glanced out at a cold, grey world outside.

It was early December and winter had descended with sudden urgency in the past week.

Freezing blue skies and a stillness in the air had given way to the slow, inexorable promise of snow storms and blizzards.

The weather reports were full of warnings to everyone in Manhattan to prepare to batten down the hatches.

Leo was accustomed to this. He usually spent the winter months in his penthouse overlooking Central Park because it was close to his offices and work never stopped, not even for Christmas.

This time, though, a spate of high-level deals meant that his feet had hardly touched the ground for three months.

He’d spent more time out of the country than in it and, when he had been in it, he’d had to endure the low-level, passive-aggressive complaints from his current girlfriend who had had to deal with last-minute cancellations and late arrivals with monotonous regularity.

He hadn’t had a leg to stand on when it came to any counter-arguments, but it had just been another headache to deal with.

Two days ago, he had broken up with her.

‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ he had said, internally wincing at the platitude. ‘I can’t help my schedule and it’s never going to change. You deserve better.’

Leo was shocked at how fast his blonde-haired, blue-eyed catwalk-model girlfriend, who had the face of an angel and a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth expression, had turned into such a foul-mouthed, oath-spitting, shrieking harridan.

She’d sworn revenge and told him that he might be rich but he was a loser who would never be happy, not if she had anything to do with it.

Then she had changed tack and pleaded and begged.

Finally, in the face of his unyielding silence, she had stormed out with the parting shot that he could forget it if he thought she was going to return any of the things he had given her.

He hadn’t, as it happened. So here he was—sitting in the back of his BMW and pleased to be leaving behind the annoyance of an ex who would no-doubt make it her duty to irritate the living daylights out of him, at least until she got bored and moved on to someone else.

Which, with any luck, wouldn’t take long.

Maybe he should give up on women for a while.

The older he got, the more predictable the outcome of his relationships seemed to be.

It was as though a thirty-one-year-old bachelor was a lot riper for the picking than a twenty-two-year-old one, especially when the older version had money to burn.

His last five girlfriends had become varying shades of nightmare.

They had stampeded through all the warnings he had delivered about not wanting to commit to anything permanent and, after the honeymoon period of a handful of months, had begun with gusto a serious pursuit of ‘something a little deeper’.

It was tiresome.

How hard would it be for him to ignore his libido for a while and focus on work?—They were a lot more straightforward than the demands of women.

He slid back the partition separating him from his driver and asked him to put on some music.

‘Classical,’ he said.

‘Music—classical?’

‘Why are you looking so shocked, Eddie?’

‘I didn’t think you knew what music was, sir.’

Leo grinned. Eddie, the fifty-seven-year-old veteran who had been with him for six years, was probably the only person on the planet who felt free to speak his mind to him.

Leo had rescued him from life on the streets, taken with the placard he’d been holding which had said, ‘you see where you’d be if you’d walked a mile in my shoes’.

He had given him money, clothes and eventually counselling and a job with him and he hadn’t lived to regret any of it.

‘Every day is a school day, Eddie. Keep the volume low. I might try and get some sleep.’

‘Good idea, Mr Cruz. You work too hard.’

‘Thanks for the advice, Dad. I’ll make sure to keep it in mind.’ He smiled, slid back the partition and settled back to sleep.

Just a few emails to check and he would kill his stress by actually relaxing and switching off his phone.

He flipped open his phone to check his emails.

He had three PAs working for several arms of his businesses with a remit to siphon off any work correspondence that belonged in his junk bin.

Any legitimate acquaintances who wanted to contact him personally would already have his private email address.

So how had this email got through? How had it not been automatically binned when the address was just a name and the subject matter had been left blank?

But there it was, sandwiched between an email from suppliers in China and one from the CEO of a microchip company wanting to arrange a conference call about a takeover.

Then Leo saw the name and every muscle in his body tensed as shock slammed into him. He sat up. All notion of catching some sleep was gone.

C. Farraday… . Cassie—Cassie Farraday.

He had spent eight years making sure that name was erased from his mind; eight years forgetting her. But now, fingers a little shaky as he opened the email, Leo realised that the past might not have been buried quite as deeply as he had hoped.

Cassie sat back in her chair, closed her eyes and thought that the last thing she felt like doing on a Saturday afternoon was working her way through a bunch of accounts that were never going to add up to anything but grief, misery and heartache.

The deeper she dug, the more the debris rose to the surface, and she’d been digging away for the past five months.

In between holding down her day job as a caterer, she’d done nothing but dig, dig, dig.

How many more gaps in her family’s finances was she going to find?

How much more money had disappeared into the ether?

And how on earth had she not spotted that her dad had been sinking as he’d done his best to cope with years of her mother’s ill health?

He’d taken his eye off the ball and his company, once his pride and joy, had paid the price through mismanagement and poor investments which had never been properly scrutinised.

Everything she and her mother had been left after her dad had died was slowly draining away to pay bills that had been piling up for weeks, months and in most cases years.

The holiday cottage by the lake had gone; the cars had already been returned to the dealership; most of the artwork accumulated over the years had been sold…

and the very worst of it was that the family home was hanging on by a thread.

Thank God the baying wolves at the door couldn’t lay claim to her little runaround and the company van or that would be her livelihood swept away in the torrent as well.

Cassie sighed, stood up and stretched. She was a leggy, athletic girl used to the great outdoors but stuck in the little space she rented to do her company accounts as she tried to sort out the chaos of a life rapidly unravelling.

She was twenty-seven years old but right now she felt like a hundred.

She couldn’t remember a time when she’d been truly happy, without a care in the world, whistle-while-you-work happy with her heart intact and a future radiant with hope and optimism.

Or at least she could…but those days were long gone.

She idly fiddled with the elastic band and released a curtain of poker-straight dark hair which hadn’t been cut in so long that it was now almost down to her waist, and then she absently switched off the computer.

Nothing; not a word from Leo yet, but she couldn’t blame him.

It had been a long time since they’d been a clandestine couple, too young to realise that they would never have the happy-ever-after ending they’d wanted.

When everything had fallen apart, he had walked away and never looked back.

For the hundredth time, Cassie swallowed down the bile of bitter regret that she had sent him that email a week ago.

She shouldn’t have, but she had just come from seeing her mother and desperation had overtaken her.

She had returned to her tiny rented place twenty minutes away from where her mother still lived in a handful of rooms in the fast-crumbling family mansion, and had sat in front of her computer and sent the wretched begging email.

She gritted her teeth, blanked out the memory and headed out.

It wasn’t yet two in the afternoon and she had to go and help Frankie finish off their order for the Samsons, which was a big job for thirty people with a million different dietary requirements.

And then straight home, a quick shower and she would check in on her mother.

This Saturday was going to resemble all the other Saturdays she had spent over the past few months.

Leo debated how to get to the place he had once called home.

Should he drive? Too far, especially in deteriorating weather, even though he quite fancied the freedom of a road trip. There’d be a lot of time to think and over the past eight days, ever since he’d read that email, he’d found that his thoughts had been very satisfying indeed.

However, there was only so much time out he could spare and, tempting though the thought of taking to the road was, he was regrettably going to have to give it a miss.

The length of time he’d spend there would definitely not warrant a couple of days on the road with some high-end stop-overs along the way.